Friday, April 11, 2008

The Victorian Cavalry

Depicted below are two troopers, an Officer and a Musician of the Victorian Cavalry which I have been painting as a little reward to myself after slaving over 20 infantry for a fortnight!Quite a small unit in 1887, the sixty-seven troopers of the Victorian Cavalry were nonetheless first in order of predence for the Victorian Military Forces. They were descended from the Prince of Wales' Light Horse and in time were absorbed by the Victorian Mounted Rifles. Attached to them in the field were the very similarly uniformed troopers of the Nordenfeldt battery.

These castings, like those of the Infantry are discontinued HLBS figures kindly cast up for me as a bit of a one-off. In reality they represent british Line cavalry in some version of their gala dress. As such they are not perfect for the Victorian Cavalry - for example, the Victorian Cavalry would never have worn the helmet plumes on campaign, and they would most certainly have worn rifle bandoliers. Nonetheless, they are a not unreasonable representation of the Victorian Cavalry at that time.

I gave the officer something like the dress version of the uniform to differentiate him a little from his very-similarly uniformed troopers, hence the more elaborate shabraque, and the yellow stripes on his breeches.

My visual references (see the first image in this post!) for the Victorian Cavalry are quite sparse and do not include information on what the musicians wore, so I took a little licence with the little banner on his bugle!